Mantis Prayer
by Dahne
Summary: They say it’s a kindness to let someone die laughing.


_What can the harvest hope for, but the care of the reaper man?_

Ah. There you are. I've been expecting you. Do you have an active role to play, or do you just stand there and watch? I've earned a voyeur by now. Justice, they call that.

We have things in common. I've thought of myself as your extension more than once, like any good soldier. A skull is just the mask on the other side. We're all the same.

_Onaji_, oh, nagi, the little snakes in my veins are crawling out, biting their way goodbye. I think they always wanted to.

It's a snake who let them out. How funny. I don't understand how. For a moment I thought I did. The future, or just a little to the right. To introduce me to my future.

It seems out of place, doesn't it? An insect amid mammals. Though I was the one with the flimsiest carapace. We all had the same thing in mind. Kill or be killed, it makes things so simple. Ants in god's eye, always working. Ever diligent. As much as you. And as much thanks for it. No one appreciates the jobs that need to be done. Soldier and dung beetle.

Is this where I awake from uneasy dreams?

I can hear them still. The constant fires of thought, smoke and spark signals. Do you see them? I've always wanted to show someone. Or do you see only how they cough and flicker? The hum of language is only the beginning, the code to force sense onto that senselessness and make it dance. Pasteurization for the primordial soup. Who holds the strings? Puppet limbs can be so heavy. Held too tightly, the strings cut into my hands. Every mind speaks in the same language, the guttural grunts and growls and teeth snapping to mark their territory. Disgusting. If only it weren't so funny. And so it is, and so it ever was.

Ask someone else about ever shall be.

We're all the same, no matter what words they put it in. Ocelot, the one who wants so badly to be a man without a past, he still thinks like a true son of Mother Russia. _Kak smeshno_. You must like Ocelot. Or despise him. Someone you've had to follow so closely, for so long. Thoughts betray them all. Babel would be no obstacle, for me. Only the ghosts...

They are all so close. I feel them spilling over into me. Walls are such a waste. All flow with the same tide, subservient to the moon's petty pagan tyranny. How pathetic. Dreaming that they follow lofty ideals, the beautiful thoughts that cursorily mask the primitive grunts of their true motivations. It's there to find, but they can turn away. A luxury? You would know as little as I. Sealed in their tiny individual cages, ignorant and terribly alone. Free of knowing the truth about anyone, everyone. Free of all at once, of loving the beauty of their ideal hearts as I despise them for their fragility. I feel them as though they were here, overlapping until their gravity is inescapable but remaining separate, the paltry and exquisite miracle they lack the mind to notice.

Do you know why I followed him? To find you, yes. I've grown impatient, you see. We all sought you, in our ways. And still you caught Octopus by surprise. He of the many skins and many minds, but only one at once. What limit and what luxury... His road was for his reasons. Safe into your keeping, now.

No. I followed him for love of his hatred. That...hah...singleminded blaze that burns like a cyclotol candle, beloved parasite, so brief but so bright... I see him now. The feral and destructive ambition to twist the fatality of his flaw into a grotesque perfection.

Do you know what he hates the most? That he is _intentional_. The spark would never had been lit, had he been the accident the rest of us are (ah, that first exquisite tragedy...what _is_ this? A puppet of numb, coarse organs with which to encase the mind? How inefficient, how cruel...). Had he never known. Perhaps he would be dead, like a natural man.

The 'what if's are only another kind of future.

His father never wanted it, the burden of his mistakes living and clawing onward with life's internal infernal determination, the sad and messy courses of their destiny predetermined by fat men in suits. I eyed from a distance the one-eyed one who tired of the entire eminence of the blitheness of their lies and spoke the truth, twice-blind idealist kind fool he was. And I felt the impact of the pact in the imperious boy's heart, strong angry and perhaps cruel but I cannot read the future, that if he was trash he would crush them who created him as a toy and in whose name he was made, destroy the ones who played their game of gain with the cost that was counted only by lost pieces. If only he knew that we are all of us trash, useless shed carbon cobbled in cradles of slime on stone. The father hated what he was, flax symbol that burns so well before he was ever man, that meant he never could. Hah hah... I could have loved him for only that.

Ah, and here is Wolf, with the mirage of desert death held hot in her heart. The language that her thoughts flow beneath sings like sand slipping over canvas. We kill the ones we love, so they say. Praise her for being more direct. Her dreams smell of sulfur. A mask can be a hiding or an accusation but in them it is more and less than that, a thing with a needed function. Her I love for despising me for a new reason. The first moment she saw me I felt her hatred for this twisted, wasteful thing and its affectations. I want to tell her that it is a skull, a snare that secures me in a truer and surer death, that it is a true and a necessary thing. She who would have felt no disgust for the face beneath it. Eyeholes and a scope are much the same to view from, but for distance. Making a Kurd stare at a gas mask. How funny...

Pain blooming in the desert, watered with blood. There is a relief, in taking on someone else's pain. Emphasizes and distracts from one's own... Are you there as well? After searching for you for so long, she sees only her Saladin, now. Such sadists, all of them, and sometimes it is even unintentional. It's good they don't know. There's nothing anyone can do for anyone else's pain, but make it worse. Some of them still try.

Can she really not feel it? The spiral of anguish so close.

He repulsed her, confused her, frightened her, in a way she had no words for. He refused to stay on the other end of the scope. Already someone weeps for her, as she tells her Saladin to set her free. The end of one pain is the beginning of another, and she does not so much as glance. You were what she sought, and he would have gotten between.

He turns away, but still hears it. Fool. The more he denies, the more his mind will create. The one who wanted so badly to love her. Would it make it better or worse if he had known? Worse, of course. Knowing can never make it anything but worse. Always. Such an ignorant child... Such a strange mind. Ignorance and knowledge that multiply the other. Paradox, in pairs. As the object of his yearning dies he can't hate the hand that slays her. He could even...

Hah hah hah! How pitiful. How enviable and perfectly pathetic.

Such a different breed of hopeless love. Will he ever even notice, do you think?

Hah. No use expecting you to know. What would you know of love? As little as I, I expect.

Let me tell you.

An anomaly, a fold in the brain, that makes these human animals think of their selfish desires as something noble. Pitiful things, clawing at the substance of each other to be less alone. And even those who see the source are never rid of the longing.

Hah! Yes, me as well. Though I would call myself a special case. Denial, like the future, is beyond my talents. Love, what they call love, is a temporary and special blindness; a person who fits one's vision well enough to be reduced to what one wants to see. This grand and beautiful delusion, this puerile amateur hypnosis. And the capacity, or at most the emptiness left by its lack, can never be satisfactorily destroyed.

Yes, even in that cold-eyed soldier. The girl– he would protect her, if he could. None of us can protect anyone. Not from each other. It should have been a vulnerability, but here I am and there he is. And she is, at least, still alive. One never knows. He knows enough to see that she sees him in a hero's light, and perhaps that protects him.

But the other, the rabbit who weeps for a wolf– is that it?

Yes. Oh, it's too _funny_.

How could I have not seen it? If not the potential, then the capability, perhaps, for a potential... More than some get.

From petulant cruelty I spoke, but perhaps I was right after all.

The idealism of that one is the kind that knows that heroes are not in the scheme of this world, through accident or design. And the both of them carry the scent of belief that there _is_ some design, not fate but only some sense in all this.

It's not a bug. It's a feature.

They say it's a kindness to let someone die laughing.

Nothing is kindness when you know the reason for it. Everything comes from selfishness. All anyone wants is his own peace of mind. But there is depth and scope and beauty to them, that's the cruelty, that strain of the stain still virulent, though dormant, buried in the center of the coldest mind...

But ice is transparent, Ocelot.

When first he knew my power he thought he'd been sent to meet you at last, but I was laughing. What do I care for his petty betrayals? Every human interaction is some form of use. The revolver is his honesty, and when he lives it is in its chambers, in endless repeating patterns six six six, always the same, upside-down or thrown backwards or sideways over the shoulder, all results in the same single action. The wounds he takes lodge, even when they pass through, and he digs at the scar, clawing out the itch and burn of healing at first in obedience to the voice of the animal that gnaws free of the steeljaw trap, trying to pry the shrapnel loose, now only for the joy of spreading the infection and making it bleed. The layers of contempt crawling through him, sneering at the loathsome thing he looks into him and sees, and the mean, base acid pleasure at the loathing.

They call his cruelty like a cat's at play, but masochism is man's joy alone. Yes, there are red shivers of pleasure at the power, that squalid child's joy in the words _you can't stop me_, but what transfixes him is another suffering.

_Him_, that tiny scabbed fragment of soul under glass, in whose pain he takes such delight. He shreds it in half again and again, tearing so easily like paper in his fingers, but halving cannot make it gone.

He is a cruel man, the man he is ruthless, a cold man he is, but through the crystal edifice I can see the prisoner. The one who paces the confines of his skull with caged-tiger strides, the one whose voice shouts _Where is your pride?_ and _Where is your honor?_ until he turns it to screams. Knowing better than any that the worst is the helplessness. Taking it by the throat and hissing _There was nothing you could do_ and _You did nothing. _

His way of finding the truth of a man, so crude. He could have simply asked. Snake would have said the same.

Ah, you should have seen it! Impassive as seamed stone, while his neurons lit like electricity. And every second thinking of nothing but the father, old one-eye Father of all of them. He wants to cut him open to see if his blood smells the same, but his professionalism will not permit the indulgence. 

And how that makes the prisoner dash himself bloody on the walls of years, crying his agony _I would have died for him!_ And he will say nothing but, _You did_.

Nothing dies easily. Look, how long I cling to this meek and slender thread. Your job is harder than I imagined. I've felt so many die. You'd think I would have learned.

Human minds say "insect" as a low thing, in some dialects. Minds have dialects, did you know that? Even below the level of language. And accent, syntax, mutation. And not a single pair of them are mutually intelligible. Fortunate, it might be called, by someone who cares for the species' continuation. They fascinate me.

They could say all sane minds are alike, and all insane in its own way.

They would be wrong.

There is no such thing as a sane mind.

The first thing I saw whose thoughts I could not read was a fly on the windowsill. I wanted to know what pattern in crawled in, from whence it came, why it dashed itself against the glass when freedom lay close by. But it would tell me nothing. Insects are mindless, they say. I made a game of thinking that in truth they were far beyond humanity in wisdom, enough to hide themselves from my sight. Sometimes I wonder if it was ever really a game.

Have you never thought it funny, that the Latin for war is such a pretty little thing as _bellum_? Hear the bells bells bells bells bells bells bells...I used to watch grasshoppers, as a child. They would be still for full green minutes and then leap, no matter how I stared I could never predict when. Hummed the flies and envied the locusts. Flies are a soldier's friends, like ravens.

Raven's thoughts are boulders in the snow. He is still the youth who stood at the ocean's edge, where the tide swept in out and around to salt his hide and freeze him clean. Tracked seal over frost-slick rock, to learn young what blood looks like. He is born of this place and will return to it, he has no patience for the stranger. And what could be more strange than I? He loathes me in his stolid way for being - hah, yes - unnatural. He does not blame me. But I must be of the world he knows, for I can feel him feel me die... Marked by his face, by no fault of his own. He who watched the night turn white, the stars fall and rise, the sheets of ghost color in the pure north sky. He who calls you old friend and feels no fear. Inuits say they live on souls. He has known he will kill and known he will die too long to fear it. That cruel advantage. Nothing is fair. He sees me and thinks of the runt dog that dies young, blood in the snow, the natural law that makes us as food for the black-voiced birds. That damned smug serenity, glad that none of us holds to the inconvenience of hope. I thank him.

I thank all of them. Down to the girl and him, the other one, the outside one. The shadow through the ranks, the one who did me this favor. The girl breathes still, though in ragged gasps quivering around the alien metal in her. So odd, to feel the impact and the recoil as one. The shock in one, the numb efficiency in the other, no malice toward the other in either. The human games that pit pieces against one another. A rook bears a bishop no ill will. The black birds, I hear them. I think of my life and I wonder why the only regret I feel is that I have so little meat to feed them. A weight of flesh that could sustain not so much as myself, for any extended period of time.

Hah! Maybe I drew the girl too close, in that short time, knew her too well. Her mind shows itself in deeper colors, quickly, easily. An odd thing, what she calls love. Not the obsession of the common mistake. But a want to heal, an..affection, perhaps even not affectation, a longing to draw closer. Love is the only word she has for it. Poor fool. Would anything else serve her better? She threw off hero-worship easily, but not the vulnerable veneration of mere humanity that came behind it. Though a child, she does not shy from blood. Is that pitiable? She who saw, and she who expressed the whole of it, the supine symptoms of this stillborn soul with that dense solemn syllable: _Gross! _

Hah, look who I ask. You pity no one. Or...do you pity us all?

Yes, you understand, don't you? Both of us, existing as shadows in the minds of the living... Neither a true thing, nor knowing the peace of being not. An in-between, all-seeing thing, eternal witness, the sole uninnocent of every murder...

And there he is. The one who is left, when the rest fall out of reach, even out of my reach. He burns brightly, yes, pure as the self-cannibal brother but forward moving, unashamed. He will not glance once more at me, and for that I love him, too. Dedication pure as salt veins in this granite world. Will it earn me anything, having helped him? How funny to suppose it might.

I have seen the hell in other people. How sad to see it go. 

What does the mantis pray for?

Still green silence and waiting, pray a prayer for prey

If I would kill one, I must want to kill all. There's no in between. Every perspective, all at once, a cubist's fractured inner eye. The moments of doubt, hate, fear pain sorrow joy glory envy ecstacy rage belittlement self-loathing other-loathing loving leering how can they stand it

how can they

suffering each other

Does it drag on, eternal? This incredible, enviable, unbearable pain...you would know, if any.

I hear them falling, fading, girl soldier old soldier ancient soft-scream star-shadow cold pale woman bleeding man less than words impression fading

All such beautiful tragedies

I prayed for cessation.

I reach out to hold on, a suicide scrabbling at the rope

nails breaking

I've got no more blood to shed.

I don't regret I have but one lie to live for my country.

Green hand-limbs folded it sits still, and waiting. And perhaps it will be answered.

For an answer.

To create its own answer.

Or only to give thanks that it is already too late.

Thank you...


End file.
